The Forever War

The legendary novel of extraterrestrial war in an uncaring universe comes to comics, in a stunningly realized vision of Joe Haldeman's Vietnam War parable!

The visionary Hugo and Nebula Award-winning SF tale by Joe Haldeman is beautifully realized in full color by the legendary artist Marvano. An epic SF war story spanning relativistic space and time, The Forever War explores one soldier's experience as he is caught up in the brutal machinery of a war against an unknown and unknowable alien foe that reaches across the stars.

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One might expect that a story set in the future, where men and women are drafted into military service in identical roles, would be worth reading. One would be wrong. Sexist slipping occasionally in to misogyny. I almost gave up on page 8 when I had reached my tolerance limit for the F-word, but gave it another 100 pages because it isn't good to just give up. Except sometimes it is.
Page 47:
"The orgy that night was amusing, but it was like trying to sleep in the middle of a raucous beach party. The only area big enough to sleep all of us was the dining hall; they draped a few bed sheets here and there for privacy, then they unleashed Stargate's eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground."

Jabberwock12
May 22, 2015

I read this a while back and gave it to a friend (and he never returned it)... A top-notch, great read. A true sci-fi novel.

For the longest time I never read this book because a friend, and avid sci-fi reader, told me he didn't like it much. But, since it was so well regarded I decided to finally read it. It was great. Definitely worthy of all the praise it has received. What struck me the most was how ahead of its time this book was. I think it was written in 1974, keep that in mind when you read it.

The story of a "space marine" fighting through the ages after humanity makes it's first contact with an unknown race. Every year he spends traveling to a new world to fight the enemy, hundreds of years are passing back on Earth. It begins with him as a Private in the 1990s and ends with him as a Major in the year 3000. He goes back to Earth to visit and finds an Earth he no longer knows or wishes to know. The author was a Vietnam veteran so there are lots of themes of fighting a foreign, unknowable enemy, and returning to a home that no longer exists. Very readable, funny, depressing, and entertaining.

This is Haldeman writing at his best! Plus his creative use of the "Exceptional Draft" (drafting the most intellectually gifted) makes the most logical sense from the viewpoint of lending the most credence to survival and justifiable war, while reminding people of what happened when Napoleon drafted the tallest men in France for his soldiers: future generations of shorter citizens!

This book was just as good as I remember it from my youth. Some of the best bits involve time dilation, nova bombs, a stasis field and combat within using knives and bows, swords and spears. Rereading as an adult, I found the character story fairly solid as well. There are related stories and even a direct sequel, but I don't consider this book part of a "series". (Jul 1-24)

DesPlainesReaders
Aug 24, 2012

Haldeman definitely had a point he wanted to get across, but he manages to do so in a terrifically entertaining and intricate manner. Urgency and ennui strangely collide in the form of his main character, William Mandella, who knows as little about what he is fighting for as he does about what he is fighting against. ~wearespartacus/notTom